Friday, December 27, 2013

Man is “cuckolded by the compassionate state”; the government usurps his
age-old role [as provider], which is why “welfare now erodes work and family and thus
keeps poor people poor.” When women are less dependent on men, men no
longer benefit from women’s civilizing powers, and all hell breaks
loose: “Because female sexuality, as it evolved over the millennia, is
psychologically rooted in the bearing and nurturing of children, women
have long horizons within their very bodies, glimpses of eternity within
their wombs.”

From Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, published 1981, a Book of the Month Club pick, and widely influential. (As quoted in Jennifer Szalai, "Just Deserts," The Nation, December 9, 2013.)

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Full title of Howe's column on Blunderbuss is: "I’m Queer & So Are You: Against Being Born This Way." An excerpt:

What a travesty we have made of a movement for sexual
liberation! By refusing to question our sexuality—I was born this way,
now leave me alone!—queers are often just as resistant to deviance as
the straights we’re supposedly freeing ourselves from. Gay men talk a
lot about our sexual development—when did you come out, what did your
parents say, did you ever sleep with a woman? Countless men, learning
that I have not only slept with a woman but was desperately in love with
one for four years, have challenged me to prove I’m really gay—when was
the last time you slept with a woman? Are you still into that? You’re
not like bi are you?

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Bangladesh has recognized the gender identity of hijras, whose rights are now recognized, including the right to identify their gender as hijra on government-issued documents, including passports (November 2013).

Germany (October 2013) has become the first country in Europe to permit babies with characteristics of both sexes to be registered as neither male nor female. Parents can choose to leave the gender category blank, creating the category of "indeterminate sex."

Concerning Race Suicide: “The Idle Stork” on the left has little to do
as the upper class chooses not to make babies, whereas “The Strenuous
Stork” is being worked to death by a population explosion among the
lower class.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

This ad is supposed to be a spoof of generic ads that play on female fears with regard to body image, dieting, food, etc. It's supposed to be smarter than all that and to appeal to women who are smarter than all that and are hip to the clichés. One my students just wrote a paper, arguing that the ad in fact just reproduces conventional ideas about female body image. All the while selling the low-fat cheese product, Kerry Low Low. I think my student is correct, and she got an "A" on the paper. Whaddya think?

Monday, February 18, 2013

Last month, the women’s track and field coach Bev Kearney was forced out of her 20-year-long job at the University of Texas at Austin, two months after she admitted to having had a relationship with an athlete on her team in 2002.

Days later, the university -- staring down a potential lawsuit by Kearney, USA Today reported -- announced that an assistant football coach, Major Applewhite, had faced an 11-month salary freeze and mandated counseling after revealing he had a one-night-stand with a student athletic trainer four years ago.

Kearney is a black lesbian who was due for a pay raise and contract extension before admitting her indiscretion in November. Applewhite is a white, heterosexual former Texas quarterback who has been promoted and whose salary has more than doubled since the freeze lifted.

The juxtaposition of the two cases of coach-student affairs has raised questions of fairness, discrimination and policy, not even a year after the NCAA released a report urging colleges to codify rules prohibiting relationships between coaches and athletes.

Why might she probe herself with a piece of whalebone? A turkey feather? A knitting needle?

Why would she consume medicine made of pulverized Spanish fly? How about
powdered ergot, a poisonous fungus? Or strychnine, a poison?

Why would she take a bath in scalding water? Or spend the night in the snow?

Because she wanted to end a pregnancy. Historically, women have chosen
all those methods to induce abortion. The first known descriptions
appeared around 1500 B.C. in the Ebers Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian
medical text that mentioned an abortion engineered by a plant-fiber
tampon coated with honey and crushed dates.

For most of history, abortion has been a dangerous procedure a woman
attempted to perform on herself. In private. Without painkillers.

What is most striking about this history of probes and poisons is that
throughout all recorded time, there have been women so desperate to end a
pregnancy that they were willing to endure excruciating pain and
considerable risk, including infection, sterility, permanent injury,
puncture and hemorrhage, to say nothing of shame and ostracism. Where
abortion was illegal, they risked prosecution and imprisonment. And
death, of course.

The newspapers of the mid-1800s were full of advertisements for potions,
pills and powders that claimed to cause miscarriage. “French Periodical
Pills: Warranted to Have the Desired Effect in All Cases” was one such
knowing ad that appeared in The Boston Daily Times in 1845. Those ads
spoke euphemistically of “curing female complaint,” or “renovating” or
“unblocking” the womb. They treated a problem that women called
“suppression of the courses,” the idea being that monthly “turns” were
the norm and that any cessation of normal periods meant they were
“suppressed,” or that the womb was “obstructed.”

Many of the cures for these “ailments” were nothing but sugar and dust.
But some of them were nonetheless quite effective. Those were the
dangerous ones, containing as they commonly did, turpentine, opium,
pennyroyal, aloes, snakeroot, myrrh or oil of rue. One of the most
common ingredients was ergot, or claviceps purpurea, a fungus found on
the stalks of grain. Women as early as the 16th century had observed
that cows that consumed ergot miscarried their calves. The fungus,
however, had disastrous side effects, called ergotism, also known as St.
Anthony’s fire. Symptoms included a burning sensation in the limbs
because of blood constriction, which led to gangrene. The poison could
also cause seizures, itching, psychosis, vomiting, contractions,
diarrhea and death.

Oil of tansy was another common abortifacient. Here is John Irving’s
unforgettable description, from his scrupulously researched novel “The
Cider House Rules,” of a doctor trying to save a woman after too many
tansy-oil miscarriages: “Her abdomen was full of blood...but when he
tried to sew up [the] uterus, his stitches simply pulled through the
tissue, which he noticed was the texture of a soft cheese...his finger
passed as easily through the intestine as through gelatin.” Tansy oil
rots internal organs.

Notwithstanding such ghastly scenarios, abortion did not always — or
even usually — result in death. Many women survived it, which is why for
most of history it was one of the main forms of birth control. If they
did choose to enlist help, they most often called upon another woman,
usually a skilled midwife. But by the 1850s, male doctors began to take
over all aspects of women’s reproductive care, sidelining midwives and
leading the movement to outlaw the practice of abortion. Did they save
some women’s lives by unmasking the dangers of “medicines” to cause
miscarriage? Undoubtedly. But by withholding midwives’ knowledge of how
to provide a relatively safe abortion in the early stage of pregnancy,
they drove other women to undergo the procedure at the hands of the
unskilled, until the United States Supreme Court made abortion legal on
Jan. 22, 1973.

Women’s historical willingness to endure horrible dangers, to submit to
extreme and prolonged pain, to risk grave injury and death rather than
remain pregnant, tells us something important about female desperation
and determination, and the price women were — and still are — willing to
pay to control their own bodies. What it tells us is that women will
always find ways to end an unwanted pregnancy, no matter what the law
says, no matter the risks to themselves.

If the Supreme Court were ever to overturn Roe v. Wade, or if
anti-abortion forces continue to successfully chisel away at a woman’s
access to safe abortion, many women will still choose abortion — by
their own hands. Leeches, lye and Spanish fly are still among the many
tools available to the self-abortionist. So are knitting needles, with
predictable, disastrous consequences. There is no law that will end the
practice of abortion, only laws that can protect a woman’s right to
choose it, or not, and to keep it the safe and private procedure still
available to us in 2013, 40 years after the Supreme Court made it legal.

Kate Manning is the author of a forthcoming novel, “My Notorious Life,” about a 19th-century midwife.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Shocking and fascinating account from Democracy Now!, who interview Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. (January 18, 2013: eve of the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.)

"A new study shows hundreds of women in the United States have been arrested, forced to undergo unwanted medical procedures, and locked up in jails or psychiatric institutions, because they were pregnant. National Advocates for Pregnant Women found 413 cases when pregnant women were deprived of their physical liberty between 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, and 2005. At least 250 more interventions have taken place since then. In one case, a court ordered a critically ill woman in Washington, D.C., to undergo a C-section against her will. Neither she nor the baby survived. In another case, a judge in Ohio kept a woman imprisoned to prevent her from having an abortion."

Feministing also covered the report by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, on January 17.

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About Me

Professor of Anthropology, University of Arkansas. Author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Co-editor of Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Popular Culture and of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity.